Alice Walker’s Yom Kippur sermon
Alice Walker will be the Yom Kippur day speaker at a San Francisco High Holiday service run by Rabbi Michael Lerner.
Known for his far-left views on Israel, Lerner lurches completely off the charts by assigning a Yom Kippur sermon to Walker, who offers up a defense of terrorism against Israelis in the latest issue of Lerner's magazine, Tikkun.
In her Tikkun essay, "Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters ‘the Horror’ in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel,” Walker calls suicide bombings “last-ditch resistance," and says it’s dishonest to engage in “blaming the oppressed for using their bodies where the Israeli army uses armored tanks."
She also is under the mistaken impression that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Philistines and that Rachel Corrie was Jewish and was killed by a tank (neither are true).
Here are a few more gems from Walker’s essay:
- She writes that women in Gaza wear headscarves (the hijab) because, “in desert countries, most of one’s hydration is lost at the back of the neck, which can quickly lead to heat stroke, so a headscarf that wraps around the neck is essential to block this loss.” While she does acknowledge that there is an “uglier side of the headscarf business,” there is no mention of how the Islamic regime in Gaza, Hamas, announced last month that it would expel any female student in Gaza who failed to wear a long coat, religious robe and headscarf while in school.
- She writes of her experience in the U.S. South during segregation: “These whites who tormented us daily were like Israelis who have cut down millions of trees planted by Arab Palestinians and stolen Palestinian water, even topsoil. They have bulldozed innumerable villages, houses, and mosques, and in their place built settlements for strangers who have no connection whatsoever with Palestine.”
Even for Lerner, this hardly seems like Yom Kippur sermon material.
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Alice Walker overlooks the fact that the suicide bombers target civilians. How would she feel if she were on a bus and some disgruntled Afghan blew it up? As she was burning to death, would she think she deserved her fate because of our policies in Afghanistan? Ironic how the Palestinians trot out the expression “collective punishment” when terrorism is the ultimate collective punishment.
Suicide bombers are not resisters. They are just victims of nasty old men who enjoy killing people. Remember Osama bin Ladin and Zawahiri chuckling about the non-pilots on 9/11, who thought they were working on a garden variety sky-jacking ? What could be a better practical joke thah recruiting people to steal a plane, and have them incinerated instead. Very amusing - if you’re a criminal sadist.
2 things have slowed the suicide bombing. 1. The defensive barrier, 2. The Pals started running out of schizophrenics.
Perhaps Ms Walker thinks resistance is the nexus of sadism and psychoses, in which case all she needs is sadism to become a resister.
The comments about the history of Arab rejectionism are well taken. As for Alice Walker, why doesn’t she notice the oppression of Blacks by the Nation Of Islam, including in her back yard? For example, in Oakland (next door to Berkeley) a (Black) journalist was shot dead in broad daylight for writing about the “Your Black Muslim Bakery” and related criminal endeavors by the Nation of Islam. I guess she’d rather go to Lerner’s soiree and lecture Jews on defending themselves.
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Steve B
09/24/09 02:08 PM
To Michael Lerner, Alice Walker, David - what are you smoking? - it may be just the thing to help me be oblivious to the next 3.25 years of that other friend of Israel, Obama!
Real insightful Alice Walker - the answer to the Palestinian-Israel struggle is “one state”? Just what the world needs - another Lebanon.
You think your solution will bring peace to the world? I guess in your travels you never came across the scorpion and the frog.
As for who-hit-who-1st - Thomas Roberts said it all. Good job Tom!